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Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been getting all government launch contracts for the past six years. That is, until SpaceX demonstrated they could reach the International Space Station successfully this year. Asked about the new competition brought by SpaceX, Lockheed CEO Robert Stevens made light of the younger company’s success. “I’m hugely pleased with 66 in a row from [the Boeing-Lockheed alliance], and I don’t know the record of SpaceX yet,” he said. “Two in a row?” When he was asked about the skyrocketing price of launching his sky rockets, he said, “You can thrift on cost. You can take cost out of a rocket. But I will guarantee you, in my experience, when you start pulling a lot of costs out of a rocket, your quality and your probability of success in delivering a payload to orbit diminishes.” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was blunt about the source of the price difference between the companies: “The fundamental reason SpaceX’s rockets are lower cost and more powerful is that our technology is significantly more advanced than that of the Lockheed-Boeing rockets, which were designed last century.” The Delta IV and Atlas V rockets of Lockheed-Boeing average about $464 million per launch, while SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches for $54 million. Its upcoming Falcon Heavy will go up for $80-125 million.

derekmead writes “By law, US companies don’t have to say a word about hacker attacks, regardless of how much it might’ve cost their bottom line. Comment, the group of Chinese hackers suspected in the recent-reported Coke breach, also broke into the computers of the world’s largest steel company, ArcelorMittal. ArcelorMittal doesn’t know exactly how much was stolen and didn’t think it was relevant to share news of the attack with its shareholders. Same goes for Lockheed Martin who fended off a ‘significant and tenacious’ attack last May but failed to disclose the details to investors and the Securities Exchange Commission. Dupont got hit twice by Chinese hackers in 2009 and 2010 and didn’t say a word. Former U.S. counterintelligence chief Joel Brenner recently said that over 2,000 companies, ISPs and research centers had been hit by Chinese hackers in the past decade and few of them told their shareholders about it. This is even after the SEC has made multiple requests for companies to come clean about cyber security breaches in their quarterly or annual earnings reports. Because the potential losses, do hacked companies have a responsibility to report security breaches to investors?”

theodp writes “The NY Times reports a judge in the second-degree murder case against George Zimmerman has ruled that Trayvon Martin’s school and social media records should be provided to the defense. Judge Debra S. Nelson said Martin’s Twitter, Facebook and school records were relevant in the self-defense case. In those instances, showing whether a victim ‘had an alleged propensity to violence’ or aggression is germane, the judge said. The defense also got permission for access to the social media postings of a Miami girl who said she was on the phone with Martin just before the shooting. Time to update the Miranda warning to include: ‘Anything you Tweet or post can and will be held against you in a court of law’?'”

DevotedSkeptic writes in with a story about the work going into feeding astronauts on a mission to Mars. “The menu must sustain a group of six to eight astronauts, keep them healthy and happy and also offer a broad array of food. That’s no simple feat considering it will likely take six months to get to the Red Planet, astronauts will have to stay there 18 months and then it will take another six months to return to Earth. Imagine having to shop for a family’s three-year supply of groceries all at once and having enough meals planned in advance for that length of time. ‘Mars is different just because it’s so far away,’ said Maya Cooper, a senior research scientist with Lockheed Martin who is leading the efforts to build the menu. ‘We don’t have the option to send a vehicle every six months and send more food as we do for the International Space Station.’”

garymortimer writes “Lockheed Martin (LMT) and LaserMotive, Inc., recently demonstrated the capabilities of an innovative laser power system to extend the Stalker Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) flight time to more than 48 hours. This increase in flight duration represents an improvement of 2,400 percent. Stalker is a small, silent UAS used by Special Operations Forces since 2006 to perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.”

Sparrowvsrevolution writes “In the wake of confirmation that the U.S. government was involved in the creation of Stuxnet and likely Flame, a look over job listings on defense contractor sites shows just how explicitly the Pentagon and the firms that service it are recruiting offense-oriented hackers. Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, and Booz Allen have all posted job ads that require skills like ‘exploit development,’ have titles like ‘Windows Attack Developer,’ or asks them to ‘plan, execute, and assess an Offensive Cyberspace Operation.’”

Sparrowvsrevolution writes “In the wake of confirmation that the U.S. government was involved in the creation of Stuxnet and likely Flame, a look over job listings on defense contractor sites shows just how explicitly the Pentagon and the firms that service it are recruiting offense-oriented hackers. Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, and Booz Allen have all posted job ads that require skills like ‘exploit development,’ have titles like ‘Windows Attack Developer,’ or asks them to ‘plan, execute, and assess an Offensive Cyberspace Operation.’”

This interactive tutorial will teach you how to use the sequent calculus, a simple set of rules with which you can use to show the truth of statements in first order logic. It is geared towards anyone with some background in writing software for computers, with knowledge of basic boolean logic. …

Proving theorems is not for the mathematicians anymore: with theorem provers, it’s now a job for the hacker. — Martin Rinard …

A common complaint with a formal systems like the sequent calculus is the “I clicked around and managed to prove this, but I’m not really sure what happened!” This is what Martin means by the hacker mentality: it is now possible for people to prove things, even when they don’t know what they’re doing. The computer will ensure that, in the end, they will have gotten it right.